Sherry Wood

Sherry Wood grew up in the same rural southern county that produced Elizabeth Dole and Dale Earnhardt, and she is distantly related to the latter. Her childhood in the 70s and 80s is the basis for her novel The Devil�s Bathwater, which weaves a harrowing coming-of-age tale set in a gritty world of kidnappers, bikers, big rigs, heroin, trailer parks, and a haunted, muddy swimming hole in which, legend held, a madwoman once drowned her son because he was possessed by the devil.

When Sherry was 18 she escaped to Chicago, where she plunged into Boys� Town and its underworld of musicians, punks, squatters, hustlers, and suburban thrill-seekers. This milieu is the setting for her first novel, Everyone is Chuckers. Through the loosely autobiographical protagonist�s senses, we witness a fractured and debased reality that is something like the surrealist nightmares of William Burroughs intersecting with the brutal Neoism of Stewart Home.

Her latest novel Suzanne Degnan is a ghost story set to a rock and roll beat with visceral depictions of what the down-and-dirty rock and roll world is really like. The book is an authentic blast of pure punk energy � the passion, the frustration, the bouts of self-destructive and irresponsible behavior, and, yes, the sex (both straight and bi) and drugs.

When you pick up Suzanne Degnan, you don�t just read about this world, you live it. The difference between this novel and other books about rock and roll is the fact that it is also a ghost story. The story�s main character, Sarah, a young bassist with an all-girl band, moves into an apartment building in Chicago and finds herself haunted by the ghost of Suzanne Degnan, a little girl who disappeared under mysterious circumstances back in 1946. Suzanne Degnan was a real person whose disappearance shocked Chicago and her murder still remains unsolved. When you come to the end of the book, she will end up haunting you in the same way she haunts Sarah in the novel.

Sherry Wood is currently living in Brooklyn and is hard at work on her next book, Redneck Snake du Jour, an ambitious, multigenerational slice of Southern Gothic horror that will read like a cross between Charlaine Harris and Carson McCullers, just as Suzanne Degnan reads like a collaboration between Patti Smith and Stephen King.

She is actively seeking representation.